IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)
A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”
While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).
What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.
What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).
DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.
The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).
The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).
Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.
THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.
“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…
CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.
But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”
I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…
TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.
